Now a sceptic might ask that, as both of these events occurred in America, might this not be less of a zombie holocaust, and more of a natural progression of a culture based entirely upon worship of slaughter and violence?

A colleague of mine was trawling the internet last week when he stumbled upon a recently-published children’s novel entitled Horrid Henry and the Zombie Vampire. He was struck by the title, fearing that this novel might be an unauthorised re-working of my own story,Vambie Zompire: The End of Days, and so immediately alerted me. Had I fallen victim to plagiarism (again)?

Based solely on the title of the novel I understood why my friend had raised the plagiarism alarm. However, even though I had not read it, I must say I did not share his concerns that my Vambie Zompire idea had been ripped off for the story.

The offending novel

As I pointed out to him, even if the author was pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable, it was very unlikely that a publisher would release a children’s novel centred around a night-long supernatural slaughter-fest, featuring rectal-impalement, brain-eating, and one instance of suffocation by dismembered testicles.

This recent, lazily regurgitated, report on a national newspaper website was drawn to my attention on a number of occasions in the last few weeks. In each instance the associate alerting me the report expressed ignorance of my astoundingly prescient Ant! Zombies! project. Instead, they would usually claim that they “saw [the story] online and thought [I] might find [aforesaid story] interesting.”

Whilst the woeful incuriousness of these people could explain why none have yet partaken of even the shortest vignettes contained within Ant! Zombies!:The First Anthology, I can think of no obvious reason as to why they felt I would find this story “interesting”.